Gaming
Gaming
The Call of Duty Ghosts next-gen gamble
Why Infinity Ward needed Oscar Winners and canine actors for their next hit, not Modern Warfare 4.
Call of Duty is a licence to print money. It’s a scientific formula for financial success. Until Grand Theft Auto V topped it earlier this month, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 enjoyed the biggest entertainment launch in history, selling 6.5 million copies in 24 hours, and raking in more than $400 million (£249m) from just the US and UK alone.
For the last few years, Modern Warfare studio Infinity Ward and the team behind the Call of Duty: Black Ops series, Treyarch, have formed the most successful tag team in entertainment history, alternating with a blockbuster release in the first person shooter series every 12 months.
Last year, Treyarch cleaned up in the Christmas rush with Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, and 2013 should have been the year of Modern Warfare 4 - but then Infinity Ward did something unexpected. It tinkered with the formula. The formula to print billions.
Instead, November 5 sees the release of Call of Duty: Ghosts, a leap forward even further into the future. If Modern Warfare was about preventing the apocalypse, Ghosts is about trying to make the most of its fallout. A decade after an attack from space has destroyed America’s status as a superpower, a combined South American ‘Federation’moves on the land of the free: you control a crack paramilitary commando squad waging war on the invaders.
The idea of the US military on its knees, being forced to wage guerilla warfare on home soil is a bold one, especially when you consider the CoD series’core audience. Why press reset on a billion dollar franchise? Why not just make Modern Warfare 4?
“We decided to move on, it’s time to do something new” Infinity Ward Senior Community Manager Tina Palacios explained at the Eurogamer Expo in London’s Earls Court this week.
We wanted to experiment with what we could do next.
It’s a gamble, in other words, and a surprisingly timed one, considering just how much is riding on Ghosts. Call of Duty is one of the flagship launch titles for both the Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4 when they go on sale in November. Getting to grips with completely new hardware is no easy feat, especially with a tight deadline and no fewer than six platforms (Ghosts will launch on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Nintendo Wii U simultaneously).
“Every time you get something new in the studio, new hardware to work with it’s exciting because on one level it’s a shiny new toy - but we don’t know the inner workings,”Palacios tells Red Bull UK. Palacios says the differences between generations will be mostly aesthetic, however. “The main difference is going to be a graphical experience, just because the next-gen consoles are going to be so much more in that sense,” she says.
It was very important to us that all of our users got the same gameplay experience because we didn’t want to alienate one person or another just for you know having a different platform or choice so. The gameplay experience is going to be the same.
A gamble Ghosts may be, but you still make your own luck, and Infinity Ward’s trying to do just that. After etching out a rough plan for the story, Infinity Ward brought in Stephan Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Traffic, to help realise the game beyond a few 007-ish set pieces, like the opening sequence’s space station catastrophe.
“We had the general plotline down and knew what we wanted our characters to be but we didn’t really have that fleshed out at all,”Palacios says. “When we ran them by Gaghan he really helped us flesh out the characters personalities and helped us to evolve the plotlines and even changed a lot of them too."
A soldiers best friend
© [unknown]
In yet another break from the norm, one of those characters just so happens to be a dog. Yep, you read that right. Guard dogs have been a terrifying staple of the Call of Duty series for years, but this is the first time you’ll have one as a companion and weapon: German Shepherd Riley can sniff out explosives for you and even attack hostiles. His abilities and behaviour are based on real military dogs, says Palacios.
"We knew from the very beginning that we wanted to have a dog as a character in the storyline because in previous Call of Duty games dogs were always the enemy, but we didn’t really know how significant his role was going to be until we actually met the Navy SEALs with their dogs,”she says.
“We met them in person and heard their stories, we saw the equipment in use and it really blew us away. All the stories really inspired the way that Riley looks and plays todays - even the bulletproof vest with the camera that pops out of it.”
Bringing the game to next-gen was by no means the team’s hardest technical challenge, Palacios adds. Basing Riley on real dogs can be tricky when you need to get one in the studio for motion capture animation - they’re not exactly RADA trained. “We mo-capped a dog and that was not easy. It took quite a while and we gave the dog a lot of breaks too.”
The single player campaign is just one part of the Call of Duty experience, of course. For many gamers, it’s all about the multiplayer, and there are a few new additions that will appeal to the online crowd. There’s the all-new Create a Soldier mode, which lets you alter how your in-game avatar looks; you can create ten different characters each with their own set of classes, meaning you can customise to your heart’s content, and current game modes have been tweaked too. Crank for insatnce adds a ticking timer to Team Deathmatch.
“The focus for us was not only tailoring our multiplayer to what fans have requested in the past but on what was new, so the most exciting feature that we have is giving players the ability to play the way they want online and have more control over their destiny in multiplayer,” Palacios says.
“That means giving them the ability to finely customise the way they look in game, whether they’re male or female, given them the choice to pick the perks they want when they want. On top of that all of the new killstreaks are going to be a lot of fun for users. We have Riley in multiplayer as a guard dog too, I think you’re going to like him.”
Perhaps the most obvious new feature is dynamic landscaping. The maps will crumble around you as you play, requiring new tactics.
“That was something really important to us because we didn’t want players to just compete against each other online, we also wanted the environment to help give them an advantage. Each map that’s coming out at launch is going to have a unique event - that could be anything from setting off booby traps to breaking down walls to barriers to even destroying a map in its entirety.”
Aqua battle in COD Ghosts
© [unknown]
In one new map set around a baseball stadium, Strikezone, the first player to earn and order a strike can flatten the entire arena. “You end up running around the debris of the stadium and it becomes a whole new map because of it.”
Multiplayer makes testing a game in advance much harder (After all, how do you strike a balance when human enemies can play in so many surprising ways?) but Palacios says the team playtest the game endlessly in their spare time, it’s that much fun. They also get a helping hand from the locals - if you’re a hardcore fan of the series it’s the sort of revelation that’ll have you filling out a green card application.
“At the studio when we’re out at lunch or at dinner, just walking around people recognise our shirts or us and they’re fans of the game. If they live nearby we invite them into the studio and they get to play through the whole campaign and multiplayer and we get their feedback on the spot.”
If you’re one of those lucky fans, you can’t have missed the countdown atmosphere in the studio: Infinity Ward have the November 5 launch date plastered all over the walls and windows of their LA HQ. As the team enter the final crunch phase, gamers will be hoping that if the studio really has tinkered with the formula, it’ll be for the right reasons.
